A Town Famous for a U.F.O. Sighting Awaits the Solar Eclipse

The small town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, is preparing for a total solar eclipse.

Photograph by Scott Olson / Getty

“Well, never in my life would I have thought I’d see this,” Rusty Cole
said on Sunday afternoon, taking a drag from his Eagle 20’s cigarette as
a crew of cameramen from a Japanese television station walked by. Cole,
who is forty-one, is a lifelong resident of Christian County, Kentucky,
an area in the southwest corner of the state that is known for its
cattle, its tobacco crop, and a violent close encounter with
extraterrestrials. He was sitting under a tent in a big green field in
the tiny village of Kelly, at an annual festival called Kelly’s Little
Green Men Days. The alien on his lime-green T-shirt held a suitcase that
read “Kelly or bust,” and Cole’s backward green hat read “Jesus ♥s
U.” The Japanese camera crew was in town for the total solar eclipse,
which will reach its greatest
point in nearby Hopkinsville, the county seat. Close to two hundred thousand
people, from every state and at least nineteen countries, are expected
to be here today to see it.

“I am shocked, to tell you the truth,” Cole said. “No one ever heard of
us before.” He paused, then corrected himself—“except for the U.F.O.
people.” Hopkinsville and Kelly have been famous among ufologists for
more than half a century, ever since a local family, the Suttons, saw
what they believed was a spaceship and at least a couple of aliens “with
a greenish-silver glow.” They shot at the creatures through the windows
of their house, but the bullets did nothing to harm them. Eventually,
some of the men alerted the police. Later, the Air Force was even called
in. “I’ve been hearing about them since I was in diapers,” Cole said.
“My church is right across those train tracks,” he added, pointing
across a hazy, hot field, to where a string of steel cars, piled high
with coal, had just rolled by, whistle blaring over the festival’s
country music. “The church elders always would tell us, ‘You know what
made this town famous? Aliens!’ ” He doesn’t believe the story but
said that he knows plenty of people who do. “It is a co-inky-dink,” he
said, nodding. “They landed on August 21, 1955. The eclipse is August
21, 2017. That is kinda scary.”

Cole works at a Japanese-owned automotive and motorcycle manufacturing
factory, T.RAD North America, which is one of nine Japanese-owned
factories in the area. Hopkinsville’s young Republican mayor, Carter
Hendricks, who was elected in 2014 and bears a slight resemblance to Jim
Carrey, told me that the town is one of the most ethnically diverse in
Kentucky. Moreover, former Presidents have visited Hopkinsville, and a
space shuttle once landed at the local Army base, Fort Campbell. But
there is still something different about this day. “We’re looking at
this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and experience for our
community,” Hendricks told me. He was in Kelly for the alien festival,
enjoying a fresh-squeezed lemonade. A John Deere tractor drove by,
pulling a couple dozen people sitting on hay bales, headed for the woods
to see the spot where the visitation reputedly occurred. “I’m assuming
it’s going to be something that, in a hundred years, there’s gonna be a
lot of history written about the eclipse weekend,” Hendricks said.

Steven Tribble, Christian County’s towering, mustachioed, Harley
Davidson-riding judge and executive for the past twenty-three years, and
a Democrat, was also at Kelly’s Little Green Men Days on
Sunday afternoon, admiring a supposedly life-size model of a silver
flying saucer, which rested ten feet away from a new cement pillar
bearing the Ten Commandments. When I’d first spoken to him by phone from
New York, Tribble had been in the middle of conducting back-to-back
wedding ceremonies in the tiny “Chapel of Love” behind his office, in
Hopkinsville. During today’s two minutes and forty seconds of totality,
he said, the marriages will come to a temporary halt. “I’m seventy years
old,” he said. “I can’t think of anything that’s ever even approached
this. This is the biggest thing in my lifetime, I do believe.” The last
time a city in Kentucky was near the center of the path of totality was
on August 7, 1869.

Tribble, Hendricks, and eighty of their fellow-Hopkinsvillians have been
working for more than a year to get ready for today. Police and
emergency services have been fortified with additional reserves from the
state, and the National Guard has been called in to help with traffic,
since most of the roads in the county are only two lanes wide. “We feel
a healthy degree of performance anxiety,” Hendricks told me. On Sunday,
the vibe in Hopkinsville was a charged laziness, calm but anticipatory,
and the weather was humid enough to leave a slight sheen covering
everyone’s skin. (Or to cause one grumpy Southerner to tell his
girlfriend, “I have enough sweat on my hand without you adding yours to
it,” after she tried to grab his empty palm.) The clearest manifestation
of the coming Great American Eclipse was an ineluctable capitalistic
hustle. Residents were advertising parking spots in the fields next to
their farmhouses; a salon was offering “E-clipse hair cuts”; stores and
restaurants were selling eclipse-themed burgers, tattoos, sorbet, and
Frappuccinos, along with T-shirts that read “I got mooned in
Hopkinsville. 8.21.17.” “We anticipate fifty million dollars’ worth of
direct economic impact,” Hendricks said.

The mayor is feeling particularly proud of his home town today. It’s
difficult to avoid the impression that this wide-open place, with its
big sky and lush land, was chosen for such a momentous, and welcome,
occasion. “Hopkinsville was the birthplace of Edgar Cayce,” the mayor
told me. “In the nineteenth century, he was known as the sleeping
prophet, because he could foretell the future.” Hendricks wasn’t sure
whether Cayce foretold this eclipse, but he was known to write, “Forces
of light on earth shall overcome the force of darkness.”